Inside ‘A Complete Unknown’: Recreating the 1965 Newport Folk Festival

When a young Bob Dylan finally stepped on stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and “went electric,” his choice was met with outrage and consternation from attendees and the festival’s organizers – but it also helped cement Dylan as arguably the most iconoclastic American musician of the entire 1960s.

It’s not really a spoiler to note that James Mangold’s forthcoming film “A Complete Unknown” culminates with the Newport Folk Festival appearance. But the Searchlight Pictures film that stars Timothee Chalamet as Dylan opens in 1961, with the singer’s arrival in New York, where Dylan meets legendary folk singers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger (played in the film respectively by Scoot McNairy and Edward Norton). A meteoric rise soon follows, and Mangold’s script, co-written by Jay Cocks, tracks Dylan’s early successes and his efforts to find his voice as a burgeoning artist truly. The overall result is a biopic that eschews the cradle-to-grave beats of other recent projects about similarly important musicians while leaning on its performers – Chalamet especially, and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez – to sing live in the film.

“I had seen Timmy do ‘Wonka,’ and I thought, ‘Okay, he can sing. I wonder if we’re going to do live stuff or not.’ And then, of course, I show up and he’s doing it all on camera, all live,’” supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester tells Gold Derby. “And it was like, ‘Oh, well, I knew he was talented, but I didn’t know he was this talented. God.’”

To create the complicated soundscape for the film – which includes Chalamet as Dylan performing in several venues, from large concert halls and small bedrooms to the outdoor lawn of the Newport Folk Festival – Mangold enlisted some of the top sound editors in the industry, many of whom he worked with previously. Sylvester is an Oscar winner for “Ford v Ferrari,” Mangold’s epic 2019 racing film. Supervising music editor Ted Caplan worked with Mangold on the Oscar-winning Johnny and June Carter Cash biopic “Walk the Line” as well as “Ford v Ferrari” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Re-recording mixers David Giammarco (a three-time Oscar nominee) and Paul Massey (an Oscar winner and 10-time nominee) also worked with Mangold on “Ford v Ferrari.” Only sound mixer Tod Maitland (“West Side Story”), who primarily worked on the East Coast where the concert scenes were shot, is a first-time collaborator with Mangold. But like his sound colleagues, Maitland is a top member of the field and a five-time Oscar nominee.

“Jim constructed this in a way, when he co-wrote the script, that the very first time Timmy performs, it’s a test. Is he going to be Bob Dylan? Or is he going to be Timothee Chalamet pretending to be Bob Dylan?” Sylvester says of the film, which opens with Dylan meeting Guthrie in a hospital room and performing for the singer and his friend Seeger. 

“Because Timmy was so involved in this project – and had been for more or less five years on the job [since Mangold first approached him in 2019 with the project] – he had grown into this confidence that he could perform these songs,” Sylvester adds. “So when the camera rolled, it was him, after five years of preparing, sitting down, and doing the songs. And he’s not necessarily mimicking or trying to do a personification of Bob Dylan. He embodied the whole thing. He put himself in that position. And so we wanted to make sure that the first test which was everybody’s litmus test for the performance passed. This is the guy, and this is his story, and you’re gonna believe it from day one.”

To accomplish this, Sylvester says, the sound team went with an approach that prioritized less over more. “So we stood back. Nothing is going on in the hospital room. There used to be sound effects in the background of the empty hospital and people walking around, doors opening and phones ringing, and it all went away,” he says. “We let him do his thing. And you know, it’s like, ‘Are you now our believer?’ Because we are.”

But while the sound department played such a key role in bringing “A Complete Unknown” to audio life, Sylvester says so much credit for the film’s success must go to co-editor Andrew Buckland. Another longtime Mangold collaborator – and, like Sylvester, a fellow Oscar winner for “Ford v Ferrari” – Buckland and co-editor Scott Morris made sure the live singing was appropriately presented for audiences to feel what was so apparent to cast and crew on the set.

“When you cut live singing, you have to treat each take as a unique take,” Buckland tells Gold Derby, noting as an editor he couldn’t just group shots together because every performance was slightly different. “It added a layer of complexity that just took a little time to find the right rhythm. And fortunately, for all the actors who were singing, their tempo and pacing was pretty consistent throughout the takes.”

But the pacing was key to the entire film. “A Complete Unknown” moves, pardon the pun, like a rolling stone – and Buckland says he and Morris were keenly aware of how the movie should lead audiences from sequence to sequence.

“Jim really emphasizes this idea when we cut, of how scenes flow into the next scene. He describes it as like falling into the next scene,” Buckland says. “So we were constantly evaluating when is the latest we can enter the scene, and when is the earliest we can leave that scene. What is the pithy moment of that scene, and then is it revealed? Once it’s revealed, then we can move on. So overall, you get that sense of this propulsion throughout the whole film that allows you to sort of move. It doesn’t feel like you’re moving too fast. It feels like the right moment to sort of fall into the next scene.”

“A Complete Unknown” includes several performance scenes, one seemingly better than the last. But just as the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was a turning point for Dylan in real life, it serves as the climax to Mangold’s film. In putting the scene together, Buckland says they compared the effort to the recreation of the 1966 24 hours of Le Mans race that ends “Ford v Ferrari.”

“When they shot the scene, they shot the entire performance. So three songs were sung consecutively,” Buckland says. “There were many takes of these and different angles and everything like that. So we really had to find the right moment to tell the other stories within the scene. … but we also, at the same time, didn’t want to leave Bob completely. So that was the one scene that took the most time and effort to explore. We were creating the dramatic beats from those 20-minute takes of Timothee performing all those songs and figuring out how to break that down. That scene was the one that took the longest. But it’s not a surprise.”

“A Complete Unknown” is out in theaters on Christmas Day.